I am not sure how ISP pledging support to Linux could mean
anything. It probably only establishs Red Hat has the
defacto standard for commercial linux distribution over other
Linux vendors.
My interpretation of Mr. Sidgmore's comment is that he
doesn't have any idea about Linux. And their marketing/public
relations dept hasn't done ample research to tell him what
to say ... so in effect he is just staying, "I don't know."
If I had to guess, I think comments toward Solaris will be
different because chances are MCI Worldcom is running on
some mixed environment which includes UltraSparc Boxes and
Solaris OS. I am not even sure if they have any Intel
boxes that they use as servers. Uunet is pretty old,
chances are they run on old IBM mainframes. The brand
Solaris is pretty well established, although it says
nothing about the quality of Solaris-X86 OS.
The key point here is neither Linux nor Solaris are ready
to be end-user operating systems. If anything they will
be focusing on enterprise applications.
Just because Intel and Netscape pleadges support it doesn't
mean that they are committing to Linux being the defacto UNIX
standard. They did so more to cheese off Microsoft. If anything
it helps the unix market. But I believe that Sun has to do
much more to establish Solaris as a serious player for the X86
archictecture. On the other hand, I don't expect Intel and
Netscape to give such show of solidarity towards Sun. That
would really alienate Microsoft as well as a host of
other X86 UNIX providers.
But if there is one comment I have to make about SUN is that
they have not done enough to garner grass root support for
Solaris. They should do more.
- Chung
>>>
Hi Chung - Do you think MCI WorldCom would make a similar
comment about Sun Solaris?
(http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980930S0003)
From the article: "...Netscape and Intel may be cranking up support
of Linux with their investment in Red Hat Software Tuesday, but not
all ISPs, particularly the largest one, plan to quickly embrace this
suddenly popular version of Unix.
John Sidgmore, vice chairman of MCI WorldCom, said his own
company, which owns Uunet Technologies, has had a lot of internal
debate about Linux, but hasn't made a decision about whether it's
something the carrier wants to support.
"I really don't know -- there's been no testing [of Linux]," said
Sidgmore, prior to his keynote presentation at ISPCon here in San
Jose, Calif., Tuesday. "[Linux] seems to come out of nowhere, and
those things always scare me." ..."
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